Welcome to the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center Welcome to the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center uses Stowe’s life and work to inspire YOU to change your world. Stowe wrote the anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, in 1852. The world was never the same. Abolition became possible. Emancipation became law. But today, in the 21st century, inequity is everywhere. What would Stowe do? What will YOU do? Change in Hours of Operation, January 7, 2017 Shop AmazonSmile and Support the Stowe Center You shop. Amazon gives. READ MORE » NEW! The Stowe House Preservation Tour Get a behind-the-scenes look at the $3.3 million preservation project in the Stowe House, a National Historic Landmark See Katherine Kane on Comcast Newsmakers In Spring 2016, Stowe Center Executive Director Katherine Kane sat down to talk with Comcast Newsmakers. Stowe House Preservation The 1871 Stowe House is getting its first major interior preservation since its public opening in 1968! The Stowe Center is open year round for tours.

Katherine Kane Talks on WRCH Hear Stowe Center executive director in conversation with Shelley Best Salons at Stowe -- On the Road! Program Coordinator Maura Hallisey recently facilitated a conversation on white privilege at UCONN. READ MORE » 2016 Marathon Reading "Uncle Tom's Cabin" Volunteers read aloud from Harriet Beecher Stowe's bestselling anti-slavery novel -- cover to cover over 24 hours March 19-20. Bank of America announces Art Conservation Grants Four Stowe Center paintings to be conserved - Two by Stowe herself and two acquired by her. READ MORE » ICYMI: 2015 Stowe Prize Conversation on Race 2015 Stowe Prize winner Ta-Nehisi Coates and WNPR's John Dankosky in an inspiring program. Kudos to CT-N for filming on their busiest day and to The Hartford for their leadership as the Legacy Presenting Sponsor of all Stowe Prize events. Watch here. READ MORE » "Uncle Tom's Cabin" - read it in installments!

On June 5, 1851, Stowe's anti-slavery novel began to appear in the abolitionist newspaper, "The National Era." Read the latest here! READ MORE » Stowe Center Kudos Hartford Courant cites Stowe Center as a model for programs encouraging civic engagement on contemporary social justice issues that connect to the work of author and activist Harriet Beecher Stowe. Stowe Center Honored With IMLS Award $150,000 Museums for America grant to plan and design a new, audience-driven experience in the Stowe House. The Family Tour - every weekend! Lots to see and do for a family weekend ! The Family Tour, craft activities and more. Thursday, October 27, 2016 #SalonatStowe: Meet the Featured Guests! Tonight, join us for "Policing the Police: How Can Communities Transform Law Enforcement?"another Salon at Stowe program. Leading the discussion will be Bishop John Selders and David McGuire. Meet th... Thursday, October 13, 2016 #SalonatStowe: Meet the Featured Guests Tonight, join the Stowe Center for a conversation on protests and social movements.

Leading the conversation will be featured guests, David Canton and Jeffrey Ogbar. Read all about them below! David ... Thursday, October 13, 2016 #StoweSyllabus: What We're Reading This Week Articles and current events that got us thinking over the week! Terror lynching in America Equal Justice Initiative with illustrations by Molly Crabapple, October 11, 2016 Harriet Beecher Stowe — Uncle Tom's Cabin [ushistory.org] Eliza is forced to flee dogs and slave-catchers in Uncle Tom's Cabin. "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war." This was Abraham Lincoln's reported greeting to Harriet Beecher Stowe when he met her ten years after her book Uncle Tom's Cabin was published. Although the President may have been exaggerating a bit, few novels in American history have grabbed the public spotlight and caused as great an uproar as Uncle Tom's Cabin. Across the north, readers became acutely aware of the horrors of slavery on a far more personal level than ever before. In the south the book was met with outrage and branded an irresponsible book of distortions and overstatements.

In such an explosive environment, her story greatly furthered the Abolitionist cause north of the Mason-Dixon Line and promoted sheer indignation in plantation America. Library of Congress LC-USZC4-6171 (3-10) Stage plays and movies were made of the controversial abolitionist novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, although most of the characters were played by white actors and many of the characters became stereotypical caricatures. Harriet Beecher Stowe was born into a prominent family of preachers. Her father, Lyman Beecher, was one of the most renowned ministers in his generation. Her brother Henry Ward Beecher was already an outspoken Abolitionist, and by the mid 1850s would become the driving force behind aiding the Free-Soil cause in "bleeding Kansas" (not permitting slavery in the new territory). While living for a short while in Cincinnati, Stowe became exposed to actual runaway slaves. Her heart ached at the wretched tales she heard. She began to write a series of short stories depicting the plight of plantation slaves. Encouraged by her sister-in-law, Stowe decided to pen a novel.

First published as a series in 1851, it first appeared as a book the following year. The heart-wrenching tale portrays slave families forced to cope with separation by masters through sale. Uncle Tom mourns for the family he was forced to leave. In one heroic scene, Eliza makes a daring dash across the frozen Ohio River to prevent the sale of her son by slave traders. The novel also takes the perspective that slavery brings out the worst in the white masters, leading them to perpetrate moral atrocities they would otherwise never commit. Harriet Beecher Stowe lost a child in infancy, an experience that she said made her empathize with the losses suffered by slave mothers whose children were sold. The reaction was incredible. Uncle Tom's Cabin sold 300,000 copies in the North alone. The Fugitive Slave Law, passed in 1850, could hardly be enforced by any of Stowe's readers. Although banned in most of the south, it served as another log on the growing fire. The book sold even more copies in Great Britain than in the United States. This had an immeasurable appeal in swaying British public opinion.

Many members of the British Parliament relished the idea of a divided United States. Ten years after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the British people made it difficult for its government to support the Confederacy, even though there were strong economic ties to the South. In the end, Mr. Lincoln may not have been stretching the truth after all. Harriet Beecher Stowe: Mother and Reformer The death from cholera of her young son Charley caused Harriet Beecher Stowe to empathize with slave mothers whose children were so often torn from them, and so it planted the seed for Uncle Tom's Cabin. This beautifully illustrated website offers excerpts of the book and several of Mrs. Stowe's personal letters touching on issues of motherhood. The Beechers Both Harriet Beecher Stowe and her sister Catherine Beecher were advocates of women's education. Although they collaborated on "The New Housekeeper's Manual," a guide to the "woman's domain" they disagreed on whether women should step beyond that sphere to engage in political action. This short commentary from the University of Pennsylvania explains. Report broken link ... I HAVE BEEN the mother of seven children, the most beautiful and most loved of whom lies buried near my Cincinnati residence.

It was at his dying bed and at his grave that I learned what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her. Frederick Stowe: In the Shadow of Uncle Tom’s Cabin By James Tackach ‘So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war! President Abraham Lincoln reportedly said to Harriet Beecher Stowe when he met her at a White House reception on December 2, 1862. Lincoln’s hyperbole held a degree of truth. Stowe’s blockbuster novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, serialized in The National Era in 1851 and 1852 and published in book form shortly thereafter, had so highlighted the issue of slavery that, a decade later, America’s young men were willing to slaughter each other in unimaginable numbers to preserve or destroy that peculiar institution. Ironically, one of the casualties of the war that Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped to ignite was Frederick William Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s fourth child.

A veteran of some of the Army of the Potomac’s bloodiest engagements, Frederick Stowe became an official war casualty at Gettysburg when he was hit in the head by a shell, fired during the artillery barrage before Pickett’s Charge. But the war alone was not responsible for the ruination of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s son. Frederick Stowe was already a casualty long before the Confederate guns began firing upon Fort Sumter–to some degree a casualty of his mother’s fame. Mrs. Stowe’s writings might have helped free America’s slaves, but her literary fame and the demands it placed upon her complicated Frederick’s upbringing, perhaps creating problems that worsened as a result of his wartime service. Harriet Beecher Stowe and her husband, Calvin, were New Englanders. Harriet had moved to Ohio in 1832 with her father, Lyman Beecher, who had taken a teaching post at Lane Seminary. Calvin Stowe and his first wife, Eliza, had also left the East for Ohio so that he could teach at the seminary.

Seventeen months after Eliza died in a cholera epidemic that swept through Cincinnati during the summer of 1834, Calvin married Harriet. Twin girls, Hatty and Eliza, were born to the couple in September 1836, and Henry Ellis Stowe was born 16 months later. Frederick William Stowe was born in Walnut Hills, Ohio, near Cincinnati, on May 6, 1840. Read More in Civil War Times Magazine Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!! Harriet Stowe was bedridden for two months after the birth of her fourth child, so Frederick was sent to live with a wet nurse in Cincinnati–the first of many separations from his mother that Frederick endured during the first 15 years of his life. Calvin, too, was often away from home, lecturing and raising funds to keep the ever-troubled Lane Seminary financially solvent. The Stowe family suffered through numerous personal and family tragedies. In the summer of 1843, when Frederick was 3, Harriet’s brother George shocked the family by committing suicide. During the next three years, Harriet suffered two miscarriages and became ill with cholera.

Tragedy struck again two years later, when the Stowes’ third son, Samuel Charles, born in January 1848, died of cholera at the age of 18 months. Less than a year after the boy’s death, the Stowe household was again disrupted. Calvin accepted a teaching position at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and in April 1850 Harriet and her three older children–the twins and Henry Ellis–headed east to set up household there. In Maine, Harriet began writing the novel that would make her famous, completing weekly installments of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for The National Era from June 5, 1851, through April 1, 1852. The novel made Harriet an overnight celebrity. Public speaking engagements followed, and in the spring of 1853 she sailed to Great Britain to spread the anti-slavery doctrine there. While Harriet was writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin and carrying its message across the United States and abroad, Calvin Stowe was struggling with his own career. He taught for a semester at Bowdoin, then returned to Lane Seminary in Ohio for a term.

At the same time, Calvin was offered an attractive position at Andover Theological Seminary in Andover, Mass., which he decided to accept. For a period of two years he became a traveling professor, teaching at three schools and commuting incredible distances to honor the commitments he had made to each institution. As she was arranging for the publication of her first book of short stories in 1842, Harriet had questioned whether her professional efforts would negatively affect her children. Our children are just coming to the age when everything depends on my efforts, she wrote. They are delicate in health, and nervous and excitable, and need a mother’s whole attention. Can I lawfully divide my attention by literary efforts? Biographers disagree to what extent her career negatively affected her children. Certainly, there were factors out of her control, such as young Samuel Charles’ dying of cholera and Henry Ellis’ drowning when he was 19 years old. Frederick’s sister Georgiana May, born in 1843, became addicted to morphine and died in her 40s. As for Frederick himself, his problem was alcohol, a common enough vice in the mid-19th century.

By the age of 16, he was a full-blown alcoholic. While his mother was touring Europe in 1856 and 1857, Frederick’s father sent him to his uncle, Thomas Beecher, to dry out. The Rev. Thomas Beecher operated a storefront church in Elmira, N.Y., and he had firsthand experience and success working with alcoholics, prostitutes and derelicts. Beecher committed Frederick to a nearby facility that specialized in the water cure, a mid-19th-century form of therapy that was used to cure depression, alcoholism and various physical maladies. Water cure patients bathed frequently, drank large quantities of fresh spring water and were wrapped daily in dampened blankets in an effort to purify their bodies of harmful substances. Just as it seemed that Frederick was on the road to recovery, the Stowe family experienced another devastating tragedy when Henry Ellis drowned while he and several of his Dartmouth College classmates were swimming in the Connecticut River. At the very moment when Frederick needed his parents most to support his recovery, they were distracted by yet another family catastrophe. Nonetheless, Frederick was determined to set his life straight.

In August 1859, he joined part of the Stowe family for a European tour. He hoped that vigorous hiking would help cure him of his craving for alcohol. On March 31, 1860, Frederick wrote to his father from Rome, admitting that he had been a very troublesome thing…for a long while and expressing hope that, when he returned to America, he would be a comfort to him. He claimed to have changed a great deal while traveling. Frederick returned to the United States and enrolled at Harvard Medical School for the fall 1860 semester. Many of his uncles had entered the ministry, but he thought that a physician’s career was one that would also bring the family great honor. In the spring of Frederick’s first year at Harvard, the Civil War abruptly interrupted his plans for a medical career. After President Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteer troops to put down the rebellion, Frederick joined Company A of the 1st Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, which was formed in May 1861. For three weeks, the regiment headquartered at Boston’s Faneuil Hall and drilled before patriotic spectators on Boston Common.

While Frederick trained, his mother wrote letters in which she fretted about the temptations and dangers of the camp that her son might confront and about his being prisoner among barbarians, or wounded and helpless. In mid-June, the new troops boarded a ship for Washington, D.C., making a stop in Jersey City. While Frederick’s boat was docked there, his mother was visiting her brother in New York City. Hearing that her soldier son was nearby, Harriet boarded the Fulton Ferry and traveled to New Jersey to meet him. In a letter to her husband the next day, she described the young soldier as bristling with knapsack and haversack, and looking like an assortment of packages. He was in high spirits, and Harriet stuffed his pockets with fresh oranges. Frederick saw his first action a month later. On July 16, 1861, Brig. Gen. Irvin McDowell led 35,000 Union soldiers toward Confederate troops massed at a railroad junction near Manassas, Va. En route, men from the 1st Massachusetts looted stores in Vienna and burned houses in Germantown.

They got their first taste of battle on July 18 as they approached Bull Run Creek, near Blackburn’s Ford. There, Brig. Gen. Daniel Tyler, Stowe’s divisional commander, sent men from the 1st Massachusetts and 12th New York regiments against Rebel troops stationed on the opposite bank of Bull Run. The Confederates beat back the Federal assault, killing 13 men in Stowe’s regiment and wounding 20 others. Three days later, the First Battle of Bull Run was fought. After that catastrophic Union defeat, Stowe was truly a veteran soldier, and he received a promotion to sergeant when his regiment regrouped in Washington. For the next two years, Stowe saw little action. The 1st Massachusetts remained encamped near Washington for several months. In January 1862, he was transferred to the 1st Massachusetts Heavy Artillery Regiment, which was assigned to garrison duty at Fort Runyon and other nearby forts southwest of Washington. The presence of a celebrity’s son in the regiment thrilled Frederick’s new comrades, prompting the regimental historian to note his arrival in his journal and comment that he had considerable social prestige. Stowe was soon promoted to second lieutenant.

Garrison duty was monotonous; days were filled with endless drills and guard duty. For Stowe, who was still drying himself out, the temptation to drink came often, despite nightly temperance meetings in Union camps. On September 17, 1862, Stowe wrote to his mother and complained about the dreariness of camp life: My regt will neaver [sic] go into action and so long as I remain here I shall neaver be advanced. Harriet quickly acted on her son’s complaint. She traveled to Washington in late November, stopping at Fort Runyon to see Frederick before meeting with President Lincoln to discuss the forthcoming Emancipation Proclamation. While in Washington, she spoke with an old friend, Brig. Gen. Adolph von Steinwehr, a divisional commander in the Army of the Potomac’s XI Corps, about her son’s problem, and he agreed to appoint the young lieutenant to his personal staff as assistant adjutant general, with a promotion to captain. As a general’s aide-de-camp, Stowe was exempt from combat duty. He delivered messages and filed reports for his commanding officer, usually performing his duties a fair distance away from the fighting.

But that changed when the Union army moved onto the field at Gettysburg. The XI Corps was one of the first to arrive and clash with the Confederates at Gettysburg. At 1 p.m. on July 1, 1863, Maj. Gen. Oliver Howard followed Brig. Gen. John Buford’s cavalry onto the high ground outside the town. Howard sent part of his corps to meet the Confederate troops already sweeping through Gettysburg, and posted his remaining forces on Cemetery Hill. Frederick spent the duration of the Battle of Gettysburg on Cemetery Hill. His corps took heavy casualties during the battle for the hill on July 2, the second day of the conflict. The next day the men waited nervously for the inevitable final push that would determine the outcome of the battle. At about 2:30 p.m., a monstrous Rebel artillery barrage began on Cemetery Ridge to soften the Federal lines in preparation for Maj. Gen. George Pickett’s doomed charge. During the shelling, according to General von Steinwehr’s official report, Capt. F.W.

Stowe, assistant adjutant-general of this division, was…severely wounded in the head by a piece of shell. As word spread of the terrible battle at Gettysburg, the Stowes, like so many other Americans on the home front, waited anxiously for news. The family learned of Frederick’s wound almost two weeks later, via a letter from a Union chaplain. Addressed to Harriet, the letter stated that among the thousands of wounded and dying men on this war-scarred field was her son, who had been struck by a fragment of a shell, which entered his right-ear. The chaplain added that young Frederick was quiet–and cheerful, longs to see some member of his family, and is, above all, anxious that they should hear from him as soon as possible. When the makeshift hospitals on the Gettysburg battlefield were closed, Stowe was sent to New York City for extended care and recovery. In the fall of 1863, when it became apparent that his condition would not allow him to return to combat, he was honorably discharged from the Army of the Potomac.

Soon after his discharge, Frederick moved to his parents’ new home in Hartford and began drinking again, often disappearing for days at a time. When sober, he struggled hard to break his addiction. He joined the Episcopal Church, hoping that a new spiritual life would help dissuade him from the temptations of the flesh. His parents, thinking that a warm climate might help their wayward son, leased a cotton plantation and later purchased a citrus farm in Florida for Frederick to manage. But he continued drinking and failed miserably as a plantation overseer. In 1867, the Stowes paid for their son’s stay at an alcoholic treatment center in Binghamton, N.Y., but he was still unable to kick his habit. Stowe’s problems were a great embarrassment to his family, yet his mother stuck by his side. Harriet implored her daughters to understand their wayward brother. Fred was no weaker, no more unsuccessful against his besetting sin than you against yours–only the consequences to him are more fatal and dreadful, she wrote.

In another letter, Harriet asserted: Fred will not fall away so as to finally perish, and I have strong faith in his final recovery….God will hear my prayers and open some way of escape. Harriet’s prayers were not answered. During the summer of 1871, Frederick boarded a ship in Florida bound for the West Coast. He arrived safely in San Francisco after the long journey around Cape Horn. From there, he intended to go to sea, in hopes of breaking his alcohol addiction. But Frederick disappeared before boarding any ship. He was never heard from again. His parents hired private investigators, but no trace of their missing son was ever discovered. What happened to Frederick Stowe? Suicide is one possibility. A few months before disappearing, he wrote to his mother, [D]id I only think of my own confort [sic] I would kill myself and end it all, but I know that you and all the family would feel the disgrace such an end would bring upon you and the talk and scandle [sic] it would give rise to. Other explanations for Stowe’s disappearance are also plausible. Perhaps he met some gruesome end while touring the rough and rowdy waterfront taverns along San Francisco’s wharf.

Perhaps he was shanghaied and pressed into involuntary servitude aboard a sailing vessel for the rest of his life. Or he might simply have changed his identity and cut himself off from his family to avoid causing the Stowes further embarrassment. Uncle Tom's Cabin Uncle Tom's Cabin info@stowecenter.org Uncle Tom's Cabin Uncle Tom's Cabin was initially released in serial format in the National Era, a weekly newspaper, from June 5, 1851-April 1, 1852. See HERE for the text of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as originally released in The National Era. You will find each chapter, followed by scholarly commentary, and links to Stowe’s A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and related materials. Click HERE to see photos from the 2014 Marathon Reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Click HERE to visit the award-winning website, Uncle Tom's Cabin: Generating a Rising Tide of Responsibility to End the Institution of Slavery. Two eight-grade students from Cleveland, Ohio created the site which placed 4th in the nation at the 2014 National History Day and won a Chronicling America Award from the Library of Congress and National Endowment for the Humanities.

Harriet Beecher Stowe's best known novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), changed forever how Americans viewed slavery, the system that treated people as property. It demanded that the United States deliver on the promise of freedom and equality, galvanized the abolition movement and contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War. The book calls on us to confront the legacy of race relations in the U.S. as the title itself became a racial slur. Uncle Tom's Cabin was a runaway best-seller, selling 10,000 copies in the United States in its first week; 300,000 in the first year; and in Great Britain, 1.5 million copies in one year. It resonates with an international audience as a protest novel and literary work. LEARN how Stowe encouraged President Lincoln to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Background: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Slavery As a young wife and mother living in Cincinnati, Harriet Beecher Stowe met former and fugitive enslaved people. Cincinnati, then the western frontier of the United States, was an ethnically and culturally vibrant city.

On the Ohio River across from Kentucky, a slave state, the city exposed Stowe to the public face of slavery. Stowe knew about slavery before she moved to Ohio. Her own grandmother kept African American servants who had probably originally been enslaved, and her father had preached in favor of the colonization movement, supporting the creation of Liberia as a settling point for freed people. But in Ohio, Stowe heard first hand stories from former enslaved people; witnessed slavery while visiting Kentucky; and employed fugitives in her home. When Harriet and Calvin learned that their servant was actually a runaway in danger of being returned to slavery, Calvin and Harriet's brother Henry Ward Beecher helped her escape and reach Canada and legal freedom. "...the enslaving of the African race is a clear violation of the great law which commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves" Stowe also learned that even the discussion of slavery could divide a community when students at her father's school, Lane Seminary, rioted after anti-slavery debates were forbidden. Background: The Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act On September 18, 1850, the U.S. Congress passed the Compromise of 1850.

Although intended to address the concerns of slave holding and free states, and thus preserve the Union, historians disagree whether the Compromise diffused or fortified sectional interests. There is no doubt, however, that it helped galvanize the abolition movement and clarify Stowe's personal stance on slavery. Among the provisions of the Compromise of 1850 were the end of the slave trade, but not slavery, in Washington D.C., and the creation of a new, stricter, Fugitive Slave Law. Helping runaways had been illegal since 1793, but the 1850 law required that everyone, law enforcers and ordinary citizens, help catch fugitives. Those who refused to assist slave-catchers, or aided fugitives, could be fined up to $1,000 and jailed for six months. It also eliminated what little legal protection fugitives once had. Before 1850, some northern states had required slave-catchers to appear before an elected judge and be tried by a jury which would determine the validity of a claim.

After the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, anyone could be taken from the street, accused of being a fugitive from slavery, and taken before a federally appointed commissioner who received $5 for every fugitive released and $10 for every one sent south. Free blacks and anti-slavery groups argued the system bribed commissioners to send kidnapped people into slavery, and obliged citizens to participate in the slavery system. Stowe was furious. She believed the country was requiring her complicity in a system she thought was unjust and immoral. Living in Brunswick, ME while Calvin Stowe taught at Bowdoin College, Stowe disobeyed the law by hiding runaways. When she shared her frustrations and feelings of powerlessness with her family, her sister-in-law Isabella Porter Beecher suggested she do more: "...if I could use a pen as you can, Hatty, I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is." Moved by the letter, Stowe swore she would "if [she] lived." The publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin The first installment of Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared on June 5, 1851 in the anti-slavery newspaper, The National Era.

Stowe enlisted friends and family to send her information and scoured freedom narratives and anti-slavery newspapers for first hand accounts as she composed her story. In 1852 the serial was published as a two volume book. Uncle Tom's Cabin was a best seller in the United States, Britain, Europe and Asia, and was translated into over 60 languages In 2012, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center Executive Director Katherine Kane lent expertise to a NEWS STORY about an archeological site related to former slave Josiah Henson. Harriet Beecher Stowe used Henson's story, along with that of other slaves, to develop the character of Uncle Tom in her famous antislavery novel. Synopsis of Uncle Tom's Cabin "I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is." Uncle Tom's Cabin opens on the Shelby plantation in Kentucky as two enslaved people, Tom and 4-year old Harry, are sold to pay Shelby family debts. Developing two plot lines, the story focuses on Tom, a strong, religious man living with his wife and 3 young children, and Eliza, Harry's mother.

When the novel begins, Eliza's husband George Harris, unaware of Harry's danger, has already escaped, planning to later purchase his family's freedom. To protect her son, Eliza runs away, making a dramatic escape over the frozen Ohio River with Harry in her arms. Eventually the Harris family is reunited and journeys north to Canada. Tom protects his family by choosing not to run away so the others may stay together. Sold south, he meets Topsy, a young, black girl whose mischievous behavior hides her pain; Eva, the angelic, young, white girl whose death moved Victorians to tears; charming, elegant but passive St. Clare; and finally, cruel, violent Simon Legree. Tom's deep faith gives him an inner strength that frustrates his enemies as he moves toward his fate in Louisiana. The novel ends when both Tom and Eliza escape slavery: Eliza and her family reach Canada; but Tom's freedom comes with death. Simon Legree, Tom's third and final master, has Tom whipped to death for refusing to deny his faith or betray the hiding place of two fugitive women.

Harriet Beecher Stowe Center | 77 Forest Street | Hartford, CT 06105 | Phone: 860-522-9258 | Fax: 860-522-9259 | info@stowecenter.org SparkNotes: Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Context Uncle Tom’s Cabin Table of Contents Plot Overview Upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe for the first time, Abraham Lincoln reportedly said, “So this is the little lady who made this big war.” Stowe was little—under five feet tall—but what she lacked in height, she made up for in influence and success. Uncle Tom’s Cabin became one of the most widely read and deeply penetrating books of its time. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was translated into numerous languages. Many historians have credited the novel with contributing to the outbreak of the Civil War. The daughter of an eminent New England preacher, Stowe was born into a family of eccentric, intelligent people. As a child, she learned Latin and wrote a children’s geography book, both before she was ten years old.

Throughout her life, she remained deeply involved in religious movements, feminist causes, and the most divisive political and moral issue of her time: the abolition of slavery. Stowe grew up in the Northeast but lived for a time in Cincinnati, which enabled her to see both sides of the slavery debate without losing her abolitionist’s perspective. Cincinnati was evenly split for and against abolition, and Stowe wrote satirical pieces on the subject for several local papers there. She often wrote pieces under pseudonyms and with contrasting styles, and one can see a similar attention to voice in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which dialects and patterns of speech contrast among characters. Though Stowe absorbed a great deal of information about slavery during her Cincinnati years, she nonetheless conducted extensive research before writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She wrote to Frederick Douglass and others for help in creating a realistic picture of slavery in the Deep South. Her black cook and household servants also helped by telling her stories of their slave days. Stowe’s main goal with Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to convince her large Northern readership of the necessity of ending slavery.

Most immediately, the novel served as a response to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it illegal to give aid or assistance to a runaway slave. Under this legislation, Southern slaves who escaped to the North had to flee to Canada in order to find real freedom. With her book, Stowe created a sort of exposé that revealed the horrors of Southern slavery to people in the North. Her radical position on race relations, though, was informed by a deep religiosity. Stowe continually emphasizes the importance of Christian love in eradicating oppression. She also works in her feminist beliefs, showing women as equals to men in intelligence, bravery, and spiritual strength. Indeed, women dominate the book’s moral code, proving vital advisors to their husbands, who often need help in seeing through convention and popular opinion. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in episodes in the National Era in 1851 and 1852, then published in its entirety on March 20, 1852. It sold 10,000 copies in its first week and 300,000 by the end of the year, astronomical numbers for the mid-nineteenth century.

Today, analysis of both the book’s conception and reception proves helpful in our understanding of the Civil War era. Within the text itself, the reader finds insights into the mind of a Christian, feminist abolitionist. For example, in the arguments Stowe uses, the reader receives a glimpse into the details of the slavery debate. Looking beyond the text to its impact on its society, the reader gains an understanding of the historical forces contributing to the outbreak of war. More Help Uncle Tom’s Cabin is published - Mar 20, 1852 - HISTORY.com Uncle Tom’s Cabin is published Share this: Uncle Tom’s Cabin is published Author Uncle Tom’s Cabin is published URL Publisher A+E Networks Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is published. The novel sold 300,000 copies within three months and was so widely read that when President Abraham Lincoln met Stowe in 1862, he reportedly said, “So this is the little lady who made this big war.” Stowe was born in 1811, the seventh child of the famous Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher.

She studied at private schools in Connecticut , then taught in Hartford from 1827 until her father moved to Cincinnati in 1832. She accompanied him and continued to teach while writing stories and essays. In 1836, she married Calvin Ellis Stowe, with whom she had seven children. She published her first book, Mayflower, in 1843. While living in Cincinnati, Stowe encountered fugitive slaves and the Underground Railroad . Later, she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in reaction to recently tightened fugitive slave laws. The book had a major influence on the way the American public viewed slavery. The book established Stowe’s reputation as a woman of letters. She traveled to England in 1853, where she was welcomed as a literary hero. Along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, she became one of the original contributors to The Atlantic, which launched in November 1857. In 1863, when Lincoln announced the end of slavery, she danced in the streets. Stowe continued to write throughout her life and died in 1896. Related Videos Stowe's Life and Uncle Tom's Cabin Stowe's Life and Uncle Tom's Cabin BY JOAN D.

HEDRICK, DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY, TRINITY COLLEGE Harriet Beecher Stowe had a profound effect on nineteenth-century culture and politics, not because her ideas were original, but because they were common. Somewhat paradoxically, she remains one of the most controversial writers America has produced. What makes Stowe so radical is that she insisted upon putting her ideas into action. As Jane Tompkins has written about Uncle Tom's Cabin, "Stowe's very conservatism — her reliance on established patterns of living and traditional beliefs — is precisely what gives her novels revolutionary potential." * Harriet Beecher was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1811, the sixth child of Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote. Her father was the best known evangelical preacher of the antebellum era. Born in 1775, that revolutionary year, he was determined to have a powerful role in the shaping of the new republic. The first of his sermons to bring him national attention was an attack on what he considered the anti-democratic practice of dueling.

Preaching at a time when religion and politics were closely allied, Lyman Beecher also condemned what he considered the "national sin" of intemperance and the horrors of slavery. Harriet's mother was as private and retiring as her father was public. Roxana Foote Beecher embodied what the nineteenth century termed "true womanhood," summarized by historian Barbara Welter in four cardinal virtues: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. * That was all a proper nineteenth century middle class woman was expected to be or do. Roxana died at the age of 41 of tuberculosis, worn out by frequent childbearing and the hard work of maintaining a family on a preacher's salary. Harriet Beecher Stowe discovered a way to combine the strongly marked gender roles of her parents. Writing was an activity pursued in the parlor — in the private sphere where women were expected to be — yet when writings were published they reached an even broader audience than Lyman Beecher was able to fit in his church. In the days before commercial entertainments, families made their own amusements in the parlor; they played music, created amateur theatricals, or read aloud stories and poems written for the occasion.

Far from being a departure from women's social role, writing was an integral part of it. Participating in literary games and writing letters to distant family members were simply extensions of women's role to maintain the bonds of family. The needle and the pen were not that far apart. Litchfield boasted a vibrant literary culture — it had a law school, a female academy, and some of the most cultivated minds of the age. Literary salons were a regular feature of Litchfield society, and the Beecher parsonage when it was not hosting these had as many as twenty-five people living under its roof who provided a ready audience for domestic literature. Harriet remarked that hardly anything happened in their household without her older sister Catherine picking up a pen and turning into a humorous composition. Harriet, who was the chief mourner at funerals for animals, remembered Catherine's epitaph for a dead cat: Here died our kit Her race is run, And she lies here. It's not great poetry, but it conveys the ordinariness of writing and the ease with which the everyday doings and sayings of the Beechers passed into literature.

At this time there was no such thing as American literature — the periodicals were filled with material pirated from Britain. International copyright had not yet been established, and most editors thought it foolish to pay for what they could take for free, an attitude that slowed the development of our national literature. An exception was Sarah Josepha Hale, who paid authors fifteen dollars a page for stories published in her Godey's Ladies Book. As a consequence, Godey's sported not only the fashion plates for which it is most remembered, but stories by Stowe, Hawthorne and Poe. It was women who saw the potential for making literature a career, who wrote the first best sellers, and who laid the groundwork for the creation of American literature. Harriet Beecher was well prepared for her literary career, not only by her informal education in the parlors of Litchfield, but also in Sarah Pierce's Litchfield Female Academy, which she entered at age eight. She soon became a regular writer, offering at age nine to write weekly compositions. When she graduated at age thirteen, her composition was read aloud at the school exhibition. It was entitled "Can the immortality of the Soul be proved by the light of nature?" She argued the negative.

When he heard the essay, Lyman Beecher leaned over to the person next to him and asked who wrote it. When the answer came, "your daughter, sir," Harriet experienced the proudest moment of her life. CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE She continued her education at the Hartford Female Seminary, founded by her sister Catharine. Eleven years older than Harriet, Catharine acted as mother and mentor from the time of Roxana's death in 1816. Aware that whatever knowledge she possessed had "walked into her head," Catharine determined that Harriet's experience would be different. The first tasks she set her sister were in Latin and Greek, thought to be among the most difficult subjects in the male curriculum. Like the Litchfield Female Academy, Catharine's school offered far more than the "ornamental" education that had been the rule for women — a little music, painting on fans, the social graces that made women marriageable. The curriculum of both schools included rhetoric, geography, the natural sciences, history, mathematics, and moral philosophy — thought to be the most important subject in the male college curriculum and typically taught by the president of the college.

Thus Harriet Beecher enjoyed an education equivalent to that of a man. At sixteen (the age that a woman's education was considered complete) she extended her education for five years by becoming a teacher of composition at her sister's Hartford Female Seminary. CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE In 1832 Lyman Beecher accepted the presidency of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati and removed his large family from New England to Ohio. Schools and seminaries were part of his plan to "save the West" from the increasing numbers of Irish and German immigrants who were pouring into the Mississippi Valley. With their beer drinking and their Catholicism, they threatened Lyman Beecher's vision of a protestant evangelical republic. The twenty-one-year-old Harriet Beecher approached the West in a more open and tolerant spirit. She saw the vastness of the country and observed with pleasure the diversity of cultures and voices.

A year later she published her first book, a Geography, where, with some local pride, she displayed a picture of the Cincinnati landing, where the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers created a great center for trade in what was called "the London of the West." There one could see people from many different regions and parts of the world, speaking in many different languages and accents. These voices began making their way into Harriet's writing as she pioneered the use of dialect. She was at this time a member of the Semi Colon Club, a literary salon which met on Monday evenings throughout the academic year. Members would gather to socialize, drink Madeira, flirt, discuss the latest topics of the day, and listen to the reading of stories and poems that had been written by its members. An appointed reader (apparently always male) would read the submissions anonymously. Then the group would engage in free discussion and criticism, made more frank by the practice of keeping the writer's name unknown. One can imagine how useful such an apprenticeship would be to an aspiring writer. Perhaps even more important to Harriet Beecher was the intimate nature of this gathering in the parlor.

She could see the faces of her audience and observe what moved them, what made them laugh, what reminded them of the New England many of them had left behind. She developed what would become the hallmark of her prose, an intimate narrative voice. Her first published story was written for the Semi Colon Club. Entitled "Uncle Lot," it was based on stories she had heard over and over again in Litchfield about Lyman Beecher's uncle, Lot Benton. Refracting these childhood stories through the lens of her western experience, she could now see Uncle Lot as more than just an eccentric; he was a social type, the New England farmer. Uncle Lot was the first of the regional types with which she would people her fiction. If moving to Cincinnati provided Harriet Beecher with a national experience, it also allowed her to see more clearly where she had come from. When she came to Cincinnati, she was a New Englander; when she left eighteen years later, she was an American. The West was the cradle of her career. In 1836 she married Calvin Stowe, a professor of the Bible at Lane Seminary.

Valedictorian of his class at Bowdoin College and master of five biblical languages, he was a good intellectual match for the highly educated, literary Beecher whom her brothers and sisters called a blue stocking and feared would never marry. For his part, Calvin Stowe was smitten with the Beechers and their grand schemes to redeem the West and everything else in their path. He supported Harriet in her literary career, famously telling her when she was on the verge of publishing her first collection of stories, "My dear, you must be a literary woman." Harriet was at this point signing her name "Mrs. H. E. Beecher Stowe." Calvin advised her to drop the E out of her name: "write yourself only and always Harriet Beecher Stowe, which is a name euphonious and full of meaning." DETAIL: CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE The year after she was married, an antislavery riot occurred in Cincinnati. A border city situated just across the river from the slave state of Kentucky, Cincinnati was in many ways a southern town. After James G.

Birney set up his printing press and began publishing his antislavery paper, The Philanthropist, a mob broke into his office, seized his printing press and threw it into the river. The first antislavery battles were battles over free speech. Harriet, pregnant with twins, seized the opportunity to write an editorial for the Cincinnati Journal protesting mob rule and suppression of contrary views. Her brother Edward was present when Elijah Lovejoy was murdered in Alton, Illinois for attempting to publish his antislavery paper, and many of her siblings were taking public roles in the slavery controversy. Harriet, for the most part, was content to observe the increasingly fractious national debate from the sidelines, only occasionally stirring the pot in order to see the steam rise. CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE Her writing of Uncle Tom's Cabin was precipitated by two events, one in her personal life and one in the public arena. In 1849 her sixth child, Samuel Charles, died in a cholera epidemic in Cincinnati. Cholera was a relatively new disease in the Western hemisphere and inspired dread partly for that reason and partly because it was so deadly Three thousand people died in Cincinnati in the epidemic of 1849.

We know today that cholera is spread by dirty water, but the germ theory of disease was not at that time understood. To people in the nineteenth century it was an act of God, a biblical plague. When Charley fell ill, Harriet wrote to Calvin that she had little hope of his recovery. There was no medical intervention available at the time, and all Harriet could do was watch helplessly while her eighteen-month-old child was wracked by convulsions and lost all the fluids in his body. She later wrote that there were circumstances of such bitterness in the manner of Charley's death that she didn't think she could ever be reconciled for it unless his death allowed her to do some great good to others. She also wrote that losing Charley made her understand what a slave woman felt when her child was taken away at the auction block. The year following Charley's death Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law. This law, like the Compromise of 1850 of which it was a part, was an attempt to hold the nation together around the contradiction of slavery in a democratic country. It required citizens to assist the sheriff in catching runaway slaves, stipulating fines and imprisonment for those who refused.

No longer could the North pretend that "the peculiar institution" was just the South's problem. The Fugitive Slave Law brought slavery home to the doorsteps of northerners, who had to decide what they would do if a fugitive slave came knocking at their door for assistance. Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin to encourage citizens to disobey what she took to be an unchristian law and to engage white parents, many of whom, she knew, had lost a child, in the deep question of what a slave parent feels. CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE She wrote to Gamaliel Bailey, editor of the National Era, proposing what she thought at the time would be a series of three or four sketches. Her letter reveals the urgency with which the slavery question now occupied her: Up to this year I have always felt that I had no particular call to meddle with this subject, and I dreaded to expose even my own mind to the full force of its exciting power. But I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak.

The Carthagenian women in the last peril of their state cut off their hair for bow strings to give to the defenders of their country, and such peril and shame as now hangs over this country is worse than Roman slavery, and I hope every woman who can write will not be silent. CLICK TO SEE LETTER Her story began appearing in weekly installments, beginning with the June 5, 1851 issue of the National Era. and would run for nearly a year. In the first scene, a slave master in Kentucky, Mr. Shelby, is negotiating with a slave trader, Mr. Haley. Shelby is not an unkind master — he even lets his slaves read and practice religion — but Mr. Shelby is in debt and Haley holds the note he must make good. Shelby agrees to sell Tom, the slave who has raised him and who, because of his exceptional loyalty, trustworthiness, and Christian character, is very valuable. While Stowe engages in strategic satire of the scale of values being applied to Tom, Haley observes that he is not quite enough to cover the debt. At this point in the negotiation into the room comes Harry, the five-year-old child of slave woman Eliza.

Taken with the boy and thinking to raise him for the "fancy trade," Haley agrees that if Shelby will include him, he will write off his note. Meanwhile, listening on the other side of the wall is Eliza, the child's mother, who understands that Mr. Shelby plans to sell her child. She resolves to steal away with him in the night. She packs up some articles of food and some of Harry's toys and sets out, carrying the child as long as her arms will bear and then setting him down and rolling an apple ahead of her to make him run as fast as his legs will carry him. At a memorable point in her flight, Eliza comes to the Ohio River, the boundary between the slave state of Kentucky and the free state of Ohio. She approaches the ferry man and asks him to take them across. He points to the cakes of ice careening on the river and says that if they put a boat in the water it will be broken to pieces. At this point Eliza hears the voices of the slave catchers in close pursuit, and in a desperate act, holds tight to her child and leaps onto an ice cake, somehow managing to get from that ice cake to the next and the next.

When Uncle Tom's Cabin was put on stage at the National Theater in New York, it was said that there was "not one dry eye" when Eliza reached the other side of the river. Of course, Stowe knew that if she could evoke that depth of response from a white audience, she did not need to make arguments about slavery. She had already succeeded in making them see the subjectivity of a black person. In the process, she transformed her loss of Charley into Eliza's gain of Harry. When Eliza reached the other side of the river with Harry, it was as if Stowe was setting her own child down gently on the other side after his terrible death. Propelled by Stowe's grief and her prophetic voice, Uncle Tom's Cabin took the world by storm. When it was published in book form in March of 1852 it sold 300,000 copies in the U. S. in the first year of publication alone. Sales in the British Isles topped a million and a half. Realizing the power of Stowe's pictorial prose, supporters of slavery rose up to denounce the book.

In response to charges that she misrepresented the institution of slavery (she had been to the South just once, for a three-day visit to Kentucky), she wrote A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. An antislavery polemic in its own right, Stowe's Key produced documents that corroborated her story. Some of these, such as the narratives of Josiah Henson, Henry Bibb, and Frederick Douglass, she had drawn on for her story. Many more sources she compiled after the fact, drawing in one section on legal cases that produced, in graphic detail, treatments of slaves more horrific than anything she had written. She concluded that if she had produced an inaccurate version of slavery, it was by undercoloring rather than overcoloring the evidence. A realistic depiction of slavery, she wrote, would be too awful to read. CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE One could say that the strength of her analysis came out of her identification as a woman with the lowly and the oppressed and that the limits of her novel were a function of her class and race — except that the examples of "true womanhood" she modeled were themselves a function of class and race.

Like many Yankee women with years of tradition behind them and confidence in their domestic "faculties," she displayed condescension toward both her black and her immigrant help. But it is impossible to read the works of Harriet Beecher Stowe without being impressed by the power of sympathy that pours out in all directions, a power that, as an artist, she needed to imagine in realistic detail the wide variety of social types who inhabit her fictions. In order to create Tom Loker and Simon Legree she had to feel what it was like to be them, to let them, as well as the horrors of slavery, enter into her consciousness. It takes a certain kind of temperament to do this, a temperament at once strong and optimistic (so as not to "sink" under the horror) and deeply sympathetic and almost medium-like. The visionary qualities of Stowe's fiction make it a ground of revolutionary potential, woven from common strands of daily life and fraught with all the contradictions of that life. CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE © 2007 Joan D. Hedrick.

This essay derives from a presentation at the June 2007 Uncle Tom's Cabin in the Web of Culture conference, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and presented by the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center (Hartford, CT) and the Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture Project at the University of Virginia. It draws on material from Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) and the introduction to The Harriet Beecher Stowe Reader, ed. Hedrick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Question: Who wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin"?
Answer: Harriet Beecher Stowe